CAA News Today

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

How Trump Should Support the Arts

Since Donald Trump has given few clues as to how he will approach arts policy, I thought I would lay out what a Trump administration ought to do. First, it must save the federal government money, to appeal to the Republican Congress. Second, it should stand a chance of appealing to Trump, given his stances on other issues. Third, it should offer a reasonable chance of improving the quality of the arts in the US, and fourth, the arts community should not hate every aspect of the changes. (Read more from Bloomberg View.)

What Can Artists Do to Oppose Trump?

When Vice President–elect Mike Pence went to see Hamilton on Broadway, he was doing more than enjoying a night at the theater—he was there to triumph over an enemy. For if any work of art represented the liberal hope of the Obama years, it was surely Hamilton. Here was a patriotic attempt to open the canon of American history to people of color, to tell the stories of the past in the language of the present. (Read more from Slate.)

How Big Data Is Set to Change the Art Market

In late October, Sotheby’s announced it had acquired the Mei Moses Art Indices, a database of repeat auction sales that tracks value over time. Shortly after, Artnet said it had brought Tutela Capital, an analytics firm headed by Fabian Bocart, into its portfolio, which also includes a sizeable database of auction prices. Each company has different aims, but one thing is clear: data will play a key role in how they—and the art market—move forward. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Arts Diversity: The Quota Conversation

Ask anyone in the arts about quotas and, more likely than not, you’ll get some form of commitment to a “conversation.” As in, “We should talk about whether or not to use quotas” rather than “Quotas should or should not be applied.” It’s less “Show me a quota and I’ll show you a failure” and more “These tools are limited, but I can’t bring myself to dismiss them.” (Read more from Art Professional.)

The New PhDs

American universities awarded a record number of doctorates in 2015—although the rate of growth in the number of PhD recipients continued a several-year decline. And the 55,006 recipients were more likely to be men and to be American citizens or permanent residents than they were the year before. Those are among the findings of the newest version of the federally supported Survey of Earned Doctorates, covering the year 2015. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

How to Fix the Art World, Part 4

Last August ARTnews embarked on an epic project: finding out what inhabitants of the art world think is wrong with their world and how they would fix it. In the ensuing months, the magazine spoke with more than fifty individuals—artists and curators, critics and historians, art dealers and an art-fair director—to gather a range of perspectives. (Read more from ARTnews.)

The Museum of the Present

What’s a museum? This is a question I have asked more than once in the New Criterion. It’s one this magazine has been asking since its first issue. And it’s one that I wish museums would ask more frequently of themselves. Because the answers are changing—through assumptions that are often unannounced, unacknowledged, and unexplored. (Read more from the New Criterion.)

Advice on Being Advised

It’s difficult to offer general advice on the adviser-advisee relationship because it varies so much—by discipline, professor, student, or institution. How friendly, how hierarchical, or how useful the relationship differs from one pair to the next. Still, there are some near-universal implicit rules that govern this relationship. More often than not, a student learns them the hard way. (Read more from Vitae.)